Sure, the costume looks great… But the woman doesn’t look like Lightning at all, starting with the fact that she’s Japanese and Lightning was clearly designed like an anime character would be: Surprisingly not Japanese. She could at least be glaring like Lightning ALWAYS is :/

I don’t think it’s possible to look like Lightning in real life. The
face is just too… “CG perfect”. But hey… if we wanna get to it; I
always found she looked Eurasian more than directly Asian anyways. And kinda like Tifa’s appearance from FF:Advent Children, instead of finding
someone who matches some of the nuanced physical traits (like that
super-fine jawline Lightning has, or the wide eyes and earnest smile Tifa has), they just found someone with all the common traits you find here — a very “Japanese-idol” look.

Not sure why everyone’s saying she’s not a 100% Lightning look-alike, that’s a beautiful lady in a great looking Lightning costume, great pink hair too.. a lot of cosplayers don’t even bother getting that right.. Jpn cosplayers look great too, they don’t need to be white to cosplay as anime/game chars. No one in real life has pink hair anyway..